Eureka: Charging ahead with Ghana’s first e-bike maker

0:15You're listening to Eureka on Monocle Radio, brought to you by the team behind the entrepreneurs, the show all about inspiring people, innovative companies and fresh ideas in global business. I'm Tom Edwards. Serial entrepreneur Valerie Labby is the co-founder of Wahoo Mobility, Ghana's first electric bike manufacturer. Launched in 2022, the company faced some early scepticism from investors, but fast forward to today and Wahoo's bikes are now a popular alternative to petrol-powered motorbikes across the region. With plans to expand into Nigeria, Zambia and beyond, Wahoo is putting the wheels in motion for the future of transport in Africa.

0:54Valerie stopped by Midori House during a recent visit back to London to talk about the company's rapid rise. She began by telling me how it all started. I lived in the northern region of Ghana, which is predominantly agriculture-based. And in those kind of areas, it's quite typical across Africa to see, you know, women carrying goods on their head from A to B. And that was just something that kind of struck me as a lack of kind of national productivity. Could we just move goods and people better? And so really, it's kind of coined as there is a connectivity gap on the continent. And when you put that with the average age of a vehicle in Ghana at the moment is around 14 years old.

1:36So basically, most African markets are dumping grounds for old petrol vehicles. And And when the pandemic hit, we saw that this connectivity gap became a global issue. So you saw people in London and New York turn to their Amazons, Deliveroo's. And in African markets, we saw the Bolts and Ubers starting to pop up. It kind of struck me that there is like a last mile mobility play that's going to be happening on the continent. But I really didn't want it to be fulfilled by petrol vehicles. I thought what could be a simple vehicle that could be good for delivery, could be produced locally. that could bridge the gap.

2:12And that's where I thought about a bicycle, but an enhanced bicycle. So really, the business started by buying up secondhand bicycles and converting them to be electric, getting them out on the road in both rural and urban areas. And very quickly, we had a really interesting product. And from there, I had to look at how we scale it. And so the first point was production in African markets. There aren't places where you could go and actually get EVs. There wasn't production at the time. This was around 2022. So I set up a factory that allowed me to do production at scale of initially our first product, which is our e-bike.

2:48And then the second thing, one of the biggest barriers in our markets is the affordability of new technologies, climate technologies. If you are a delivery rider in our market, most of them don't have bank accounts or can't get access to finance debt in our market is we're getting interest rates of 30 percent and you need collateral of 120 so it's just not accessible so then i was like okay if we've got a good quality vehicle we've got riders and drivers who need you know and want to transition to electric vehicles could we finance it how would we finance it then it was like okay we could only finance it if people are productive with the vehicle and that's where the fleet partnerships came.

3:28So then they kind of joined our ecosystem. And now I started to build a digital kind of profile of a delivery rider in African markets, where I have view of how much they're earning on fleet platforms, which then allows me to broker finance, because now I have a footprint also of them paying off a fixed asset. And so then we started to map telematic data of how the riders ride, which allowed me to start brokering and insurance. So we've got insurance partners. And then with that telematic data, we could start to track how much carbon we're avoiding, which allowed me to actually broker a carbon market agreement.

4:02So we started to plug in carbon markets. And then so kind of it slowly escalated from, yeah, a lady carrying something on her head to all the way kind of building out this ecosystem. And it's happened quite naturally. And I think the interesting thing is, by digitizing those processes, it's taken away a lot of the complexity and now created a kind of a one-stop shop ecosystem for infrastructure providers, financiers, and EV producers to plug into. I love that you say slow escalation. You're talking about stuff that's happened from 2022, which I can tell you is only three years ago. Each thing you mentioned there, Valerie, it sounds to me like it would be an intractable challenge.

4:41I hadn't even thought of insurance. I hadn't thought about productivity tracking. I hadn't thought about credit availability. And yet you just chalked them off. Yeah, then I found these partners, then I found these. Surely these partners or prospective partners at the time said, we need use cases, we need data points. And at the risk of asking a trite question about, you know, which came first, how can you build a compelling example without the investment or the buy-in from the partner who wants the evidence? How does that happen? Is it just sheer force of will and conviction or married up, as you said, with other use cases, I guess, that you can show?

5:13How do you do that? And within just two to three years? Yeah, I think the first thing for me was everything's about evidence. And when you think of African markets, there is this perception of risk that has been created by a lack of data. And so the first starting point for us was have a vehicle with a real rider on our roads, in our markets, and then just monitor how is the vehicle used, how much is he earning. And from that starting point allowed me to, one, understand what riders value, but then also started to understand what was needed to crowd in partners. And so for some things like the finance partners, we needed riders riding, consistently earning, and successfully paying on a, they pay a subscription plan daily or weekly for a certain period before people were saying, okay, actually, your connections rate is excellent.

6:02You know, people are paying in advance. And so I think that's one of the things that has helped us crowd in partners. I think the other side that is probably more difficult is most investments you see on the continent now are very heavily on the digital side and very light on the capex intensive actual physical things that you can touch feel and ride in our case and so that was a harder journey in terms of raising finance for that and so early days I actually spent a lot of time in markets where people build vehicles so in Germany went to the states you know went to Hong Kong to just understand what is the mindset around investing in automotive And I think that one thing that really quickly struck me is, and this is probably a story from an early investor discussion when I was told that it's not that he didn't believe in my vision, but there is no precedent for African women in automotive.

6:59So actually, it was one of these things around, he just didn't believe I could do it because no one like me has ever done it. And I think that lit a bit of a fire. I get that. I get that sense. Well, just to that point, I can imagine listeners saying, Tom, Tom, tell me, I don't know, what's Valerie's story? You've obviously got expertise across this very sort of Catholic range of different disciplines and sectors. What is the story? And I know because you did some work before providing financial support and advice for women, I guess in that same position, who were sort of doubted there weren't use cases.

7:29We can see that that thread runs through. But just give us a give us your quick bio just so we can get some context. Yeah, so I would say I'm imported or exported Ghanian. I was born and raised in the UK in a place called Welling Garden City, a small town in Hertfordshire, in a very Ghanian household. So really saw the impact of like diaspora on the continent. And I had like bedtime stories from Roald Dahl to Kwame Nkrumah's autobiographies. And I think that very much influenced kind of my initial journey. I studied economics with a development, a kind of macroeconomic lens. I did my master's in Cambridge in sustainability leadership, because I think one of the important things is all businesses need to understand their environmental impacts and their social impact.

8:13And businesses won't thrive without being meaningful and deliberate about building out financial impact, lacing in those three lenses. and then I did my graduate program with EY which was a great experience but then the credit crunch happened so that was really a very big pivot for me in terms of like finance has always come quite naturally but then I started to realize you know I was valuing things that really didn't necessarily have value and I think that was the whole subprime market with a lot of realization so I went to Ghana for a two-week holiday my parents had retired back there and then two weeks has escalated I just never came back.

8:50And I think the thing for me was, I would say more around a learning through immersion. A lot of the things that people see as problems on the continent are huge commercial opportunities. And I would say I'm an expert in nothing. But what I've managed to do is find a lot of people on this journey who have expertise in something. And so by being able to meet people and understand how people have built out different business models, how it's worked in various markets, how have they been able to do it at scale kind of helped me build a more systems ecosystem approach to e-mobility on the continent.

9:24Let's put some numbers on it because I know you did a big fundraise in 24 which I think concluded and I know there's very ambitious targets in terms of the number of these e-bikes you want to get on the roads and into these markets. Give us a few numbers just so people can start to actually see how the abstract initial ambition and then all these stages you've gone through are now materialising and coming to fruition in the real world. Yeah, so I would say that kind of my growth journey has been in three stages. So one was just kind of funding my initial vision to validate my initial vision. And we got support through the Impact Hub in Accra.

9:58We were actually incubated by them. And they did a partnership with the Siemens Foundation. And they were one of the early players in e-mobility on the continent, looking at different business models. And through that partnership, we got a seed grant to be able to do rapid prototyping, to be able to get our first 10 vehicles on the road. So that was like early days. Great. That gave us time to really understand products. Then the next stage for me was raising an equity round for growth. And that's what we've closed. So that allowed us to set up the factory. The factory has capacity now to do around 20 ,000 vehicles a year.

10:32And that's just of the e-bikes. And we're now at the stage where we're coming to diversify products to add other EVs and make it more of a vehicle agnostic ecosystem. and the stage that I'm at now is looking at finance for scale. So my longer term vision, probably my next round, we're looking at raising around 100 million to really expand my current production into a larger electric vehicle zone that can do two and three wheelers to start off with and then also charging infrastructure and that whole hardware around battery swap is a really exciting area also on the continent that we want to play.

11:08Well, I want to ask you, when you talk about EVs or anybody anywhere, even in, I mean, I guess throughout sort of, you know, whatever you want to call it, Southern Hemisphere or sort of developing markets, is this idea that, look, we lack sufficient infrastructure in, you know, developed, you know, Western European economies or in North America. How on earth can we just sort of jump forward, make a generational leap? What is that? And is this where maybe there is this opportunity? It's so untested. There's such a misunderstanding, maybe willfully in some cases of these markets, that actually there's an opportunity if you're sufficiently digital first.

11:39I don't know, to circumvent a couple of steps along the road. Is that the idea? Yeah. So I remember along my journey, I did a stint at Vodafone in Ghana when they entered. And I remember being in a meeting where people were discussing mobile money. Somebody said that, you know, Ghanaians like to pay cash. No one would ever pay mobile money. So, you know, and I feel we're in a very similar point now with EVs where people are saying, is Africa ready? Do we have energy infrastructure? This is this. And I think my first starting point is the difference with what's happening on the continent versus what happened in Europe and Western markets was the transition to EVs was very top-down policy-led.

12:20Petrol prices in Ghana, Nigeria increased 300 % in the last 24 months. It makes economic sense to make the transition. So it's very like bottom-up, people are ready to make that change. That's exciting. The second thing around the infrastructure is we have so much sun solar infrastructure is going up all over the place as an essential kind of leapfrog from your traditional you know energy and I think we're seeing a lot of smaller energy plays but the challenge has been they've been fragmented so you have a lot of different energy projects some macro some micro and with our software platform, we're basically aggregating energy players.

13:00And I think that for me is a really interesting point for us, because that means that we can offer on-grid solutions and off-grid solutions where we're leveraging existing infrastructure. And so I think that's really, for me, the inflection point to be able to scale the industry is one player doesn't need to do it all. You don't do things by halves, do you? Let me just ask you about the growth plans then. I no longer term goals, talking about maybe 50 ,000 bikes produced annually and this wider expansion. How tricky do you envisage that being? Because I guess new markets have new complexities, challenges.

13:36They might be cultural, they might be purely pragmatic. I guess you have to commit to remain flexible, adaptable, to continue these fast learnings you've talked about. How do you make sense of that, the inevitable strategic challenges that will come from that kind of growth? Yeah, so I think that there's three kind of areas of understanding. One is people, the people who are actually using the vehicles themselves, so the hardware, and then the financing. And so every market we go into, there will be proof points around those three kind of actors. And for us, what has helped us has been, I think last year, we did 3.3 million kilometers worth of riding.

14:10So we have a lot of actual data that is now allowing us to really understand what will translate in other markets, what wouldn't. And so I think this is the first starting point for us is having that growth trajectory based on evidence, what we have as evidence. And I think that's an edge that we have in the market. But I think that as an kind of an aggregator of players, it also allows us to make linkages quite quickly. So I feel that we're going in that direction. And it would be remiss for me not to ask you, Wahoo, boring question. I know you've explained it many times before, but just tell us about what it kind of means on all levels.

14:49Yeah, and I like to say it with a little bit more energy. So we say wahoo. So wahoo is interesting because it took me a bit of time to settle on the name wahoo. We went through a few iterations. And so, like I mentioned, I lived in the northern part of Ghana in a place called Tamalei. And wahoo actually means horse in the language spoken in the north. but also in the southern part of Ghana where I'm from we speak a language called tree and then in that language wahoo means like wahoo have you seen us a new innovation something that you look at as like a leader in the market and then finally the wahoo is the energy and the vibe that you feel when you're riding e-bikes through the streets of Accra and you know there's just a good feeling and enjoyment and I think that's something that people forget in terms of like people come to work on a day-to-day basis and don't enjoy themselves.

15:41And this is something that I talk to our riders and people who plug into our ecosystem is, you know, this is life, whatever it is you choose to do and do it with some vim and some energy. So I think that's all fed into the name.

15:56That was Valerie Labby, the co-founder and CEO of Wahoo. And you can learn more by heading to wahoo.me or by picking up the latest issue of Monocle Magazine's The entrepreneurs on good newsstands now. That's all for this episode of Eureka. We'll be back at the same time next week. Do drop a line to the team. You can contact Laura on LRK at monocle.com. I'm Tom Edwards. Goodbye, and thanks for listening to Eureka.